I had a fav professor who was all kinds of political and brilliant, and didn’t vote. Or care about political parties. I thought for a long time that this was just an eccentric quirk. I don’t think that is true anymore. I understand.

I’ve never much cared about the minutia of politics as a game. I think who’s holding up what bill or what the latest poll numbers are, or the handringing over whatever flavor of middle class white voters is the new ‘it’ category (soccer moms, security dads, etc) distract us from the real questions and problems. Why are millionaires over-represented in government? Why are agenda setters so completely detached from the lives of the people?

I believed in voting. I mean how can you change things if you don’t participate, right? Vote! It’s the one thing you can do to change things. I’ve missed exactly one chance to vote since I turned 18. I was very pregnant and on bed rest, not allowed up for more than 5 minutes an hour for fear that my blood pressure would kill me. So voting was a low priority. That was 1994. You all remember 1994, right? Newt Gingrich, the contract (on)for America, poor single mothers have hungry alligator children destroying the very fabric of our country. Being that I was about to become a poor single mother, I made sure I voted consistently after that. Had to protect the alligator kid, after all.

But what if voting is the secret, the reason why amoral capitalism and greed are so terribly entrenched. What if the illusion that we have a choice in all this is why we can’t give it up for a better system? I have said for a long time that politics and religion are the structures that we put over things that people do perfectly well on their own so that we can corrupt those things. Voting, elections, the sham that we are participating in our own governance, keeps us from actually participating in our own governance.